Advisor Katie Burke said a former boss once told her she needed to have a “contingency plan for childcare if my nanny couldn’t make it and it couldn’t be me.” Burke, the founder of Method Financial Planning and the co-founder of Equita Financial Network, had recently returned from maternity leave and the nanny fell ill soon after, causing Burke and her husband to work out a schedule to stay home.
Mattia said a woman once told her she was passed up for a promotion because her boss felt it would cause harm to her children, which she didn’t have and had no plans of having.
The War On Women By Men ... And Women
Women are sometimes pitted against each other trying to uphold social norms.
One woman who worked for a large brokerage firm and asked to remain anonymous said she was pitted against another woman in her office over clothes. She has sometimes worn “tomboyish” pantsuits, she says, and one male manager would compare her unfavorably to another female advisor who wore short skirts and snug dresses.
“He said [the other advisor] is dressed so nice, you should talk to her about how to dress,” she said. Her manager would give the dress-wearing advisor first dibs “on everything,” she added.
“When you’re in that environment you just think that that’s just normal for the industry and that the industry is this way,” said the brokerage advisor. “You realize this wouldn’t happen in a different industry, but you think this is just what you have to get used to.”
Women exit financial services in the middle of their careers at higher rates than their male peers and at “significantly” higher rates than women in other industries, according to Oliver Wyman. What’s more, women in managerial and executive positions with financial services “are 20 to 30 percent more likely to leave their employer than their peers in other industries,” the firm reported.